Book Image

Plone 3 Theming

Book Image

Plone 3 Theming

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site, especially in Plone. Using custom themes can help you brand your site for a particular corporate image; it ensures standards compliance and creates easily navigable layouts. But most Plone users still continue to use default themes as developing and deploying themes that are flexible and easily maintainable is not always straightforward. This book teaches best practices of Plone theme development, focusing on Plone 3. It provides you with all the information useful for creating a robust and flexible Plone theme. It also provides a sneak peek into the future of Plone's theming system. In this book you will learn how to create flexible, powerful, and professional Plone themes. It is a step-by-step tutorial on how to work with Plone themes. It also provides a more holistic look at how a real-world theme is constructed. We look at the tools required for theming a web site. The book covers major topics such as configuring the development environment, creating a basic theme product, add-on tools and skinning tricks, integrating multimedia with Plone, and configuring your site's look and feel through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). Finally, the book takes a close look at the thrilling and greatly simplified future of theming Plone sites.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Plone 3 Theming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Using stylesheets and the CSS resource registry tool


Now that we know how to manipulate the menus and tabs on our site, and to modify images and page templates in our custom folder, we will look at how to add extra stylesheets or JavaScripts. The principles here also apply to KSS files, which we will not cover here. Advanced users may also have need of KSS stylesheets (Kinetic Style Sheets) for managing AJAX-like behavior, but we will not cover this or jQuery in this book.

A special tool was created to manage CSS stylesheets, JavaScripts, and KSS stylesheets called Resource Registries (http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/working-with-resourceregistries), which consists of portal_css, portal_javascripts, and portal_kss in the ZMI. These registries give the option of consolidating multiple style or JavaScript files into a single cached file, which causes them to load faster when a site is in production. Putting your portal_css or portal_javascripts into debug mode turns off this merging...